Last week a court ruled that Israel’s largest ISPs should block access to HttpShare, a BitTorrent and http hyperlink site. Thanks to what the owners call “IFPI advertising”, the site is now so busy they’ve had to upgrade their hardware. TorrentFreak caught up with them as they cracked open the champagne.

Haifa District Court Judge, Gideo Ginat: “I order the respondents, that is Israeli internet service providers, to systematically block access to the illicit site, HttpShare, so that surfers cannot enter this site and utilize it in in order to impede upon the claimants copyrights.

In response, the site owners state: “According to Dutch law, sites providing external links allowing surfers to download movie, music, games and program are perfectly legal. Sites cannot store these illicit files on their internet servers, and that is precisely what we do not do. The site merely provides links to file sharing sites that host BitTorrent files or http downloads.

This fact doesn’t seem to have influenced the judge when he ordered the blocking of the site.

Unfortunately for the IFPI, this block has achieved nothing other than boosting the popularity of the site - dozens of news outlets wrote about the block and the result so far is that visitors are now up to 70,000 a day. HTTPShare even had to get new hardware to cope with the demand - “Big Thanks to IFPI Advertising” says a note on the site.

TorrentFreak caught up with admin ‘Andre’ to hear more:

TF: Please tell us a little about the history leading directly to the creation of HTTPShare.

HTTP: Before HTTPSHARE there was a warez site back in 2003 called ELICOMP.CO.IL. The site’s owner was Eli Amar. Eli had to join the army and could not continue running the site, however he met me and I agreed to fund the site and keep it running. The site indexed HTTP links on all sorts of servers, then we grew in size and developed a crawler which job was to track fast speed .torrent files. The crawler was added to the the site which made it even more popular. We created the VIP zone in which users get fast and direct links (min. 500KB/s) to cover the servers and the programmers cost. Read the rest of this entry »

The ‘Big Four’ record labels - EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner have started legal proceedings to force an ISP to end piracy on its network. The action, brought against Irish ISP, Eircom, is the first of its kind.

Eircom is the largest Irish ISP. Today, the Big Four record labels have started legal proceedings which they hope will force Eircom to effectively end music piracy on its network. According to the Ireland.com report, this action is the first against an ISP, rather than individual file-sharers.

Mr Justice Peter Kelly today admitted the proceedings at the court under the Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000. It appears the labels are trying to get an order to effectively force Eircom to take responsibility for their customer’s actions by saying that it’s the ISP that is doing the ‘making available’ to the public, by facilitating the infringement.

Eircom’s lawyers see if differently. They say that Eircom was “not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies”, adding that it was under no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network. Read the rest of this entry »

After originally threatening to leave, London-based EMI Records has confirmed it will remain a member of the IFPI. With its self-imposed deadline of March 31st 2008 looming, the company has struck a deal so that EMI - together with other members - will now contribute less to anti-piracy activities.

In December 2007, in an effort to pacify its new owners by cutting costs, London-based record label EMI offered its resignation to the IFPI, saying it would leave the organization over “the future structure and funding of the IFPI and the national industry bodies.” Comments made by EMI chairman Guy Hands suggested that IFPI membership cost his company, and others, in excess of $250m per year.

EMI offered a deadline - either the IFPI reduced the costs associated with membership by 31st March 2008 - or EMI would leave. Now, after a few months of negotiations, it seems some sort of deal has been struck enabling EMI to stay as a member. Read the rest of this entry »